"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Sunday, July 20, 2014

In Response to Bill Wraga's Review of The Mismeasure of Education

University of Georgia professor, Bill Wraga, offered a review of The Mismeasure of Education in the UGA-based Journal of Language and Literacy Education. Because we feel strongly that, while everyone has a right to his own perspective, she does not have a right to her own facts. Therefore, we offered JOLLE a corrective to the more glaring inaccuracies in Dr. Wraga's review. We received this response to our proposed rejoinder from Principal Editor of JOLLE, Michelle Falter:

Dear Mr. Horn,

The Editorial board regrets to inform you that we are not accepting responses to book reviews at this time. I strongly encourage you to find other people to read and review your book, and have them submit their reviews to a journal that accepts book reviews. In the future we may choose to do response pieces, but at this time, we have decided not to.

In response to Dr. Wraga’s mixed
review of The Mismeasure of Education
(TMoE) in the previous issue of JOLLE, we would like to clear up some
apparent misunderstandings as to the intent and focus of our work.We never intended TMoEto provide
“the history of educational testing” (Wraga, 2014, p. 217) in American schools,
as Dr. Wraga seems to think but, rather, to place the current misuse of value-added measurement within
the broader ideological context of social sorting via testing and
the resulting social control that
gained prominence at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was
during that initial rise of the social sciencesthat many
leading educational reformers became fixated on high stakes quantification
methods as the most socially-efficient and “scientific” tools for labeling
children and differentiating their school experiences.We now know, of course, that much of that new
science of education was a collection of more or less elaborate superstitions
derived from social Darwinism and/or the pseudoscience of eugenics.

TMoE (Horn & Wilburn, 2013) offers a brief
evolutionary and philosophical outline for the most egregious misuses of
standardized testing and testing’s high stakes value-added offspring, which
exerts so much influence in schools today.If we had attempted to offer a history of testing in the three or four
dozen pages that we devote to an overview of those
most egregious misuses of standardized
measurements, then surely we would agree with Dr. Wraga (2014) that our
rendering was “incomplete and oversimplified” (p. 217).It hardly seems fair, however, to be accused
of failing to accomplish a goal that we did not attempt.Dr. Wraga (2014)
goes so far as to label our work “historical exaggeration” that depends upon
“cherry picking evidence,” “ignoring evidence,” and “misrepresenting other
historical developments”:

For example, in a
section titled "Zealots for the Elimination of the Unfit," they
associate Franklin Bobbitt's (1918) The Curriculum with Tayloristic scientific management, although in that book Bobbitt
considered Frederick Taylor's principles as a management system a
"relative failure" (p. 84). They associate the Commission on the
Reorganization of Secondary Education's (1918) Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education not only with social efficiency-social control
doctrine, but also with standardized testing and even with eugenics, although
the report advocated none of these practices (p. 217).

In defending
Bobbitt’s work against the “social efficiency” designation, Dr. Wraga ignores
the context for Bobbitt’s description of the Taylor System as a “relative
failure.”Bobbitt’s (1918) criticism was
not that Taylor was too focused on social efficiency but, rather, that his
approach did not go far enough toward extending scientific management to, in
fact, “rule in the consciousness of the workmen” (p. 84):

The relative failure of the
Taylor System seems to result from an insufficient
attempt to enlist the intelligence and initiative of the men. The system claims
that both managers and men are working under the control of science; yet, as a
matter of fact, this science is mostly visible only to the management; and is
little or not at all visible to the men. They see only the orders. The system
represents a halfway step, however, toward actual and inevitable scientific
management. Science rules in the planning-room; it must also rule in the
consciousnesses of the workmen. . . . In a school system, for example, the
pupils are the ultimate workers. Using the terminology of the factory, the
teachers rank as foremen. It is their business not to do the work that
educates, but to get it done by the pupils. In doing this, they must know the
pupils: know their varying mental capacities, their interests, their aptitudes
and abilities, their states of health, and their social milieu (Bobbitt, 1918,
pp. 84-85).

Not only do we see here an
enthusiasm for social efficiency that surpassed even Taylor’s, but we see, too,
a more nuanced version of Bobbitt’s views than the ones he expressed more demonstrably
in “Practical Eugenics,” an article for The
Pedagogical Seminary, edited by G. Stanley Hall.In that article, Bobbitt (1909) advocated for
halting“civilization’s
retrogressive policies,” by which he meant social welfare programs
and public schools: “schools and charities supply crutches to the
weak in mind and morals” thatmust
be eliminated for Nature’s efficient weeding process to operate freely.

Taylorism applied to schooling
(Rice, 1913) provided the technology for the social agenda that Bobbitt, among
many others, embraced, which was grounded in the ideology of Social Darwinism
and made contemporary by the crackpot “science” of eugenics.In short, Taylorism provided the “efficiency”
rationale for“social efficiency,” and
the efficiency zealots in education became fixated on cheaply
sorting students and to providing them with the “differentiated” curriculums
that their class, ethnic, and racial characteristics ostensibly demanded. Under
the banner of educational science, primitive IQ and achievement test scores
were used to justify these preconceptions.

We understand that Dr. Wraga has
devoted a good deal of his scholarly life (1982, 1994) explicating, promoting,
and defending the 1918 Cardinal Principles Report issued by the Commission on the
Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE).That does not justify, however, his incorrect claim that we are off base
in suggesting a connection between CRSE and the widespread scientific racism
and eugenics enthusiasms running rampant during the early 20th
Century.The facts show otherwise.

A couple of examples should
suffice.Professor Otis W. Caldwell, who
taught at Teachers College, served as Science Chairman for the CRSE. Dr.
Caldwell was and remained an advocate of the eugenics agenda through the 1930s,
up until the rise of Nazi Germany made scientific racism less fashionable.In case any doubt remains about the
connections between CRSE and the eugenics enthusiasm of the day, below is a
clip from “Some Aspects of Instruction in Eugenics” (Caldwell, 1932) that
appeared in A decade of progress:
Scientific papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics.Here, then, is a classic example of the
most vile social policies being promoted under the guise of progressive
education aimed to serve the needs of children who cannot be motivated by some
distant future adult role:

Thus, in eugenical education, we shall
keep in mind Galton's emphasis upon future society, but in practice we should
deal with the problems and with the individuals now concerned with education.
We need less preachment about how fine it would be to have a future society
determined by eugenics, and shall need to face the far more difficult task of
trying to incorporate sound principles of eugenics into the possessions of the
young people who are now in the process of becoming this so-called future
society whose destiny is the ultimate aim of eugenics. The biological and
social facts and their meaning in relation to young people constitute the
proper foundation for eugenical instruction. Constant admonitions about a
hopeful philosophy for future use serves a good purpose, but needs to be based
upon specific biological knowledge (p. 168).

With a eugenics
enthusiast in the Science Chair for the Cardinal Principles Report, the CRSE
chose as its Chairman for the Committee on the Social Studies the former
Hampton curriculum specialist, Thomas Jesse Jones.While at Hampton, Jones had developed a “race
development” theory that he applied in teaching African-American students the
virtues of hard labor, the duties of second-class citizenship, the dangers of
too much book learning, and the folly of aspirations to social equality. Jones
believed and taught that all races are inferior to Anglo-Saxons, and because
African-Americans are at least 2,000 years behind because of their
non-Christian history, former slaves and their offspring should devote
themselves to the lowest level of domestic, agricultural, and industrial labor
(Anderson, 1988) until such time as they have developed enough to enter into
the world of social influence.Under the
sponsorship of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, which provided huge philanthropic
donations to promote the Hampton-Tuskegee Model of industrial education, Jones
(1917) wrote Negro education: A study of
the private and higher education schools for
colored people in the United States.Published by the U. S.
Bureau of Education and lauded as providing the solution to the “Negro
Problem,” the
report advocated a subjugated role for African-Americans that included industrial
education and life roles built on the lowest forms of labor and domestic
work.

Finally, we want to clear up any potential
misunderstanding as to our intended audience or the
direction for assessment that we openly and repeatedly advocate.We did not write this book as an “academic
analysis,” which seems to demand a type of rhetorical neutering that would
hinder the immediacy of our message.We
acknowledge and own the passion we put into the book, even as we apologize for
its imperfections that eluded the eye of the copy editor.Our book was written for the literate layman
who cares about the future of public education in the United States
and around the world.One final
correction: we are not calling for ending the “overreliance on high stakes
standardized assessment” (Wraga, 2014, p. 218) but, rather, we are advocating
for the elimination of high stakes
standardized assessments.If any society
hopes to have an equitable system of schools for learning and against
segregation or inequality, the first step must be the eradication of high
stakes tests.

Caldwell,
O. W. (1932). Some aspects of instruction in eugenics.In A
decade of progress:Scientific papers of
the Third International Congress on eugenics.Held at the American Museum of Natural
History, New York.

Commission on the
Reorganization of Secondary Education. (1918) Cardinal principles of secondary education. Department of the
Interior, Bureau of Education:Washington Government Printing Office.

Jones,
T. J. (1917). Negro
education: A study of the private and higher education schools for colored
people in the United States. Department of the Interior, Bureau of
Education:Washington Government
Printing Office.